Leadership Through Sadism: The Mike Rice Method

I was pleased to see Rutgers can basketball coach Mike Rice after footage of him physically and verbally abusing his players went public. But they don’t get a cookie for doing the right thing only after they had no choice:

In December, after seeing the video, Rutgers Athletic Director Tim Pernetti fined Rice $50,000 and suspended him for three games. He offered little elaboration.

So they’ve known about this thug for more than three months. They hoped it would go away. NBC News reported tonight that Rice spoke to a journalist today at his home, and was in tears. I guess he was. I wonder how the young men he bullied over the years felt when Rice was on top, and treating them like dogs.

I have no patience for creeps like this. When I was in 7th grade, and a fat, badly coordinated geek, the new coach at my school tried to teach me how to do a tire drill in P.E. class by kicking me and yelling insults at me in front of my classmates (and I wasn’t the only one treated this way). If memory serves, that coach didn’t come back after that year. I just looked him up, and he went on to become a hugely successful high school football coach. Maybe he changed. Or maybe he managed to humiliate a bunch of other kids on his way to the top.

Serious question: what is it about men like Rice that makes them think sadism is the same thing as inspired leadership? Why do young men and their parents put up with it?

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57 Responses to Leadership Through Sadism: The Mike Rice Method

RD: [W]hat is it about men like Rice that makes them think sadism is the same thing as inspired leadership? Why do young men and their parents put up with it?

To answer the second question: Because the coach will take away their scholarships, on the spot, if the young men object in any way.

(In theory, the young men could transfer to another school. However, under NCAA rules, basketball, football, baseball and men’s ice hockey players who transfer have to sit out a year, and another college generally isn’t going to waste an athletic scholarship on someone who is going to have to ride the bench.)

“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.” -Walter Bagehot

If you’ve never experienced it, a common occurrence in our over civilized era, you won’t understand it. What looks like cruelty is often extremely important in building a team of men functioning at elite levels. I don’t know anything about basketball, but that’s nothing compared to what soldiers or martial artists go through.

”You can’t let those individual moments define what he was,” junior forward Wally Judge said during a telephone interview Thursday. ”In my past two years, me being an older guy and being under other coaches, I have grown from the moment I stepped in these doors, not only as a player but also as a person because of how he has treated me.”

Sophomore forward Austin Johnson agreed.

”He did a lot for us off the court, academically, socially,” he said during a separate telephone conversation. ”I have to say I enjoyed my time, even it was an emotional rollercoaster.”

Rice was fired Wednesday, the day after a video aired on ESPN showing him shoving, grabbing and throwing balls at players in practice and using gay slurs.

”I feel if people had a chance to see the other portions of practice, or had been at practice, their judgment would not be as severe,” Johnson said. ”I am not saying what he did wasn’t wrong, because I do believe it was wrong. But it is also tough because it was a highlight reel of his worst moments.

”I never expected for this to escalate as fast as it did,” Johnson said. ”We have to deal with this and it’s new for a lot of the younger guys.”

Judge believes some of those moments come across worse on camera than they really were.

”Honestly, a lot of the things that have been seen have been taken out of context. A lot of things that aren’t seen are when we grab him and kid around,” Judge said. ”Like I said before, when people ask me why did I play for him, I told them `He’s a player’s coach.’

”Mike was almost like a big brother. He would get on the floor with us and go through drills with us. He made it fun. When you have a big brother-type of figure, you know you can play around like that. I have grabbed Mike and put him in a headlock and we joke around and kid. That was the type of relationship he built with his players.”

Eric Murdock, former director of player development at Rutgers, put together the video that showed clips of several different practices over three years. In November, he showed it to athletic director Tim Pernetti. The following month, Rice was suspended three games for improper conduct, fined $75,000 and required to take anger management classes.

Like the two Rutgers players, Pitt guard Travon Woodall also defended Rice, who recruited him when he was an assistant coach there.

”They are going at my man Mike Rice too hard,” Woodall tweeted. ”He’s the reason I came to Pitt.”

Woodall later added Rice is ”not the only coach to put his hands on a player, or talk the way he did.”

Murdock played in the NBA and was viewed in the program as someone who could mentor players. His contract was not renewed.

‘APPALLING’ BEHAVIOR
Sports stars tweet disgust over actions of Rutgers coach. See the video at FOX Sports Detroit.
”I have a lot of respect for him. When he was here, he was somebody I would talk to because he knew of my aspirations for playing at the next level and he was a guy who had done it,” Judge said. ”He was a great guy to talk to. As far as this situation goes, I understand everything that is going on; I can’t necessarily be mad at him, but it’s been blown out of proportion. There are certain ways of going about things and this wasn’t the way.”

Rice left Pitt to coach at Robert Morris before landing at Rutgers, where his record was 44-51 over three seasons. He posted a 16-38 mark in the Big East, after going 73-31 in three seasons at Robert Morris. The Scarlet Knights went 15-16 this season and 5-13 in the league.

Rice’s assistant, Jimmy Martelli, who was with him at Robert Morris, resigned Thursday.

Judge, meantime, insisted Rice wasn’t a ”villain.”

”He wasn’t a guy we hated or despised,” Judge said. ”After practice, we would all go in the locker room and laugh. It was never a sad face or a hung head. What he did was he separated the court and he separated life. When we were on the court, we were on the court and locked in. That’s why you see so many intense moments because he was so locked in on turning this program around. When we got in the locker room we were a family. We laughed.”

Johnson hopes Rutgers’ next coach can bring success to a program that hasn’t been to the NCAA tournament since 1991.

”I feel like winning solves everything,” he said. ”If we can get someone in and change the culture, I feel like all this stuff will be forgotten.”

Said Judge: ”We don’t want a white-collar, clean-cut guy. We want somebody who understands us and will push us every day, like Rice did.”

$650,000 a year for coaching basketball. And that is college basketball.

And, that is a low figure compared to some coaches.

His three days of ‘suspension’ and a $50,000 fine is more than many of us earn in a year. (just as an fyi, the President of the US earns $400,000).

And people complain about education in the US of A.

And how about that $60 million football stadium for a Dallas-area *high school*????

People were agog here in MA when a new high school swelled to $196 million or so….but, that was at least for teaching, and labs, and library and cafeteria and gyms, and the seniors do get into the top level colleges…

>If you’ve never experienced it, a common occurrence in our over civilized era, you won’t understand it. What looks like cruelty is often extremely important in building a team of men functioning at elite levels. I don’t know anything about basketball, but that’s nothing compared to what soldiers or martial artists go through.

One guest on WHYY-FM (Philadelphia) talk show Radio Times this morning was a West Point graduate whose analysis was that that the military is plenty tough but Rice crossed the line in one or two ways that really effective leaders can identify as not productive. Having experienced neither a military academy nor a sports team of any significance, I’ll take his word for it. In the end carrots and a sense of teamwork are better motivators than sticks.

Several ideas cropped up in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of this discussion, however, which bothered me. In addition, the newspapers tell us that, acting upon legal advice that an attempt to dismiss Rice for cause would not be successful, Rutgers did not fire him for cause. And yet they managed to fire him in a matter of days. How does this work? Surely the guy has a contract. If he does not, then he is, rather incredibly given the salary, worse off contractually than tenured faculty, who cannot be fired except through rather time-consuming due process, although in cases of “cause” they can probably be suspended from their duties without prior notice.

It seems to me that various demands for reform which have been made are mutually incompatible and liable to make matters worse.

First, a demand for transparency, manifest in varsity team practice sessions (like various other group activities) being open to observation by outsiders. LOL, it should take one only a few seconds to realize that this requirement would open the door to spies from opposing teams. To anyone who makes this suggestion: how would you prevent this from happening?

Second, a criticism of operating an organization on personal loyalty. This objection may be a good one, but what is the alternative? The only alternative to depending upon personal relationships that comes to my mind is depending upon written rules and policies– among them policies governing job security and dismissal. These must balance the interests of the employer and the employee to provide that an employee can be fired if necessary but not on a supervisor’s whim, and certainly not in kangaroo court of public opinion. Consequently there are wheels and they always take time to turn. If a guy is summarily fired within days, and not even “for cause”, then such policies are not effective enough. When legal advisors have emitted the opinion that such and such is not a firing offense, then the public must either absolve administrators from blame for failing to fire the miscreant or stop complaining about a mafia-like atmosphere.

Third, a suggestion during the radio program that a university president is incompetent if he isn’t well acquainted with, and attentive to, varsity athletics. Look, we spend a lot of time complaining about the exorbitant and rising costs of college. The quality of the education that students spend their money to buy has scarcely anything to do with whether the institution’s teams are in the Big 10, Division 1 or Division 2, winning, or losing. That these considerations are a huge and alien carbuncle feeding on a school will be recognized and faced by any administration whose cost-cutting and other priorities are in order. If tenured university professors must have doctorates, then it should not be too much to expect university presidents to have doctorates. And I’d guess that anyone willing and able to earn a Ph.D. in any subject is very unlikely to have had either the time or the inclination for a varsity sport as well. Students who play in the most prestigious programs are fortunate they emerge with a sheepskin at all, let alone go on to postgraduate study. These observations are just further indication of how bizarre it is that these two separate worlds are expected to coexist on self-respecting American campuses.

Such coexistence is rationally defensible, in a sense, if the sports program is a profit center. However, in Rutgers’ case it has been a multimillion-dollar money pit for so long that one might reasonably despair of its ever becoming anything more. The new president of Rutgers is more interested in building up academics than throwing good money after bad on irrelevancies. I read that he has cut the subsidy to sports by $1 million his first year. In any businesslike environment, such would be regarded as a good decision. Taxpayers ought to be delighted, rather than calling for his head on a platter. I’m not about to second-guess Governor Christie’s backing him up. Or was he, too, asleep at the switch in not watching the video of Rice’s antics four months ago?